It's been years since I've actually had a conversation with any of you. Maybe the idle reply to a post here and there, but nothing too consistent. So, what is everyone doing with themselves now? Some of you were in school long ago; did you ever get that degree? Did you change degrees? What's your current career path? Got kids? Got married? Got milk? Talk to meeeeee.

Not in school anymore. Graduated 2 years ago with an English degree. Not like it's been much use to me now; I work part-time in a deli. Woo.

Learning to drive since I never learned as a teenager. Hopefully, then I can get a better paying job, and me and the boyfriend can get our own place and settle down.

Oh yeah, and I've been with my boyfriend for 11 and a half years now. Why not married? Cause I want a nice wedding, which is difficult when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck with outstanding student loan debts and no money left over to save. Been debating just going to the courthouse and getting married anyway, but ehhhhh idk.

I'm curious what everyone else has been up to as well. How about yourself? I just lurk nowadays.

Currently in graduate school in a mental health counseling program and have about a year left. Got my bachelors in psychology back in 2014, took a year off, and then went into grad school. Am currently working parttime in a deli as well but only on the weekends while I work on my classes and internship during the week. I currently intern at a correctional facility where I counsel inmates and I think that as a whole I want to be involved with the criminal justice system especially within the jails themselves because I have a passion for the people involved.

Still with my boyfriend with no marriage in sight as of yet as we're trying to work through some growing pains with each other and finding out who we are as people as well. We've been together a little over four years at this point and once I graduate he is planning on starting a program somewhere (we're kind of leap frogging grad school) and who knows where we'll be moving to.

Other life changes that are on the darker side: Had to put down our dog Jack about two years ago because he got really sick and the vets kind of jogressed up, my grandmother is in a nursing home because her back is pretty much deteriorating and she is in chronic pain and can't stand and walk for very long (the nursing home is also in the process of buying her house to pay for her expenses so there's that too) , and my boyfriend's grandmother got very ill back in January and almost died spending a month in the hospital. She survived but I wouldn't say recovered in the slightest. She is on hospice care right now and they believe she had sepsis in the hospital and the brain damage is now causing rapidly developing dementia. It began as just a little slowness and paranoia and now it is full blown reverting to a younger age, not remembering people even looking straight at them, hallucinations, and delusions as well as drastic personality changes. She is definitely not the same woman I met four years ago and it's painful to see just how much a person can be lost while still living and breathing right in front of you.

Feeling a bit shy and awkward since I know I haven't personally talked much with you guys in particular, but hey, to hell with it; I'm in a sentimental mood at the moment I'm writing this, I'd like to actually begin having real discussions with people here again (if I ever did, that is,) and I'm not exactly ready to put this forum behind me just yet either. So where do I begin?

Well, I'm certainly not in high school anymore, that's for sure. Didn't exactly graduate like most folk do, which makes me a high school dropout. But on the bright side, I did quite a lot of soul searching and maturing since last I was here. Instead of the awkward, cringy 14 year old I was when I first showed up, who made earnest-yet-odd posts on TDP/DDF, or the 15/16 year old teenager who disappeared for weeks or months on end, I've become a 26 year old adult who's almost constantly wondering where his life's heading, how things have gotten to this, what the state and nature of the world at large is, and so on. When I'm not busy stressing myself out over most things, I'm usually being a man-child by getting lost in my favorite video games, anime/manga, cartoons and so forth. Amazing, I know.

Aside from all that, my attempts to move on with my life have been less than stellar, and that equally frustrates and bums me out. Attempts at learning to drive resulted in me becoming scared to ever try again, though nowadays I'm trying to get over that, and am willing to get behind the wheel again. Trying to get a job when I haven't even finished high school is, as you may expect, even worse for me. I can't find decent employment while living 10-30 minutes away from any kind of store, mostly because I can't drive myself at the moment, and I lack the prerequisites many employers look for. So with that in mind, I've been looking into alternative methods to make a steady income. I was told to do Youtube once, but that site's gone downhill and screws over its uploaders (not to mention I lack the equipment necessary for a decent quality video. Yes I have a web cam, but... it's a web cam.) Now I'm being told to look into working for Amazon by my family. Guess time will tell if I make a living off of that or not.

I've discovered I have an interest and possible talent in entertaining others through artistic expression and what not. I think my experience in this forum's fan-fic and RPG threads have helped me in that regard. I've taken in an interest in some of those fan made content wikis that have popped up in recent years or so, and now most of my writing activity can be found there. And in the meantime, I'm now also busting my balls to try and write my own personal shounen manga, which I have called Wild Hunt. I'm aiming for a dream career in writing and publishing manga. Here's hoping things go well and I don't become another jaded adult whose dreams were crushed years ago.

OK, so what else? I may not have even bothered to watch any Digimon anime after Savers, but I still consider myself a fan in some respect. Missed out on watching Digimon Tri, which sucks because that got me super excited. Additionally, a friend of mine introduced me to Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth a year or so ago, and I've been loving that. Helps rekindle my interest in Digimon some more. Aside from Digimon, I've been told I have "slight traces of autism" apparently. Like, something along the lines of "not 100% autism in its entirety, but there's still some in there somewhere that's tampering with your brain." Explains my high school years perfectly in my humble opinion. And so after learning about that, I've been spending the rest of my life putting up with it however I can. And other than that, I've had plenty of ups and downs going on in my life these 10 or so years since I've been here. Like Myo, my only living grandmother is also declining in health, and that has me constantly scared and worried. I'm really dreading having to hear my only grandparent may die soon. On the plus side though, my family and I adopted a bizarre but endearing cat that was stalking around our local hospital. Doesn't seem to belong to anyone, and yet he acts as if he's been domesticated before. We've named him Buddy, and now he's an inseparable member of our family. Can't imagine what life here would be like without him.

So... yeah. Hope I didn't leave anything out there, as there's been so much that's happened since 2007 or so, and I wanted to touch on everything I could remember. ...Oh, and like Blacklily, I seem to be lurking these days. Mostly because I feel like a fossil on these forums now, and am too shy to reintegrate with everyone. Hopefully I'm just being silly though.

I've spent the last 5 years in the US Navy working as an Operations Specialist aboard the guided missile cruiser USS Port Royal, with the luck of being stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. On August 26th, 2016 I went on deployment for 7 months, working in the South China Sea, the Straits of Malacca, the Gulf of Aden, the Straits of Hormuz and doing anti-piracy operations off of the Horn of Africa. I had the privilege to visit Thailand, Singapore, Bahrain, and Israel during the deployment and managed to get promoted to E5.

In September of 2017, I received new orders to another guided missile cruiser, this time USS Mobile Bay and am currently stationed in San Diego, CA. It's been a fun hall with the Navy, but I decided to sign my separation papers and will be honorably discharged this December, completing my obligated service time. In the mean time, I just started moving into my new place out here, still working on getting all of my furniture delivered and all of the utilities turned on.

Plans are to move back to Las Vegas to finish my AA and transfer to UNLV for my BA and Masters, in theory at least. Throwing becoming an electrician in the list of options as well, since I've been wanting to pick up a trade for a while now.

Couple of sad updates from my last post in September probably most things I already posted on here in different areas of the forum from time to time.

Got into a car accident (not my fault) in October and was rear ended pretty hard resulting in my car getting totaled. Have a different car now and it's been alright except that it needs a stay at a dealer for a factory defect repair because the passenger airbag COULD be a deadly shrapnel bomb if it goes off. XD;

My grandmother passed away late November at the age of 89, she was only a few weeks shy of 90. She routinely got Cortisone shots in her spine because of her back pain and she had diabetes so there was a risk of it messing up her blood sugar levels. She had a bad reaction to the shot and her stupid nursing home whom I wish my dad and uncle would sue allowed her blood sugar to be 500 for a week straight causing massive kidney damage to her already bad kidneys and that's what finally sent her sailing over the edge. Her kidneys failed and they sent her to the hospice room where she died that night, from what I hear from the doctor her last words were "I think I'm going to rest now." There are just still so many details about that week that I don't want to think about or remember, but I know it's healthy to hurt. I've been trying to grieve her loss over this break from school and interning as best I can in doses that I can swallow because she was a huge part of my life my entire life and I still get caught up on never being able to speak to her again and never hearing her voice again because we had a running joke that if anyone were going on in our area (we live in a very small area everything rural) she knew about it no matter what it was and we never knew how. I've been doing okay, I've really been teary about it the past two days because two nights ago was the first time I've dreamed about her since she passed.

Another aside from my last post is that my boyfriend's grandmother also passed away in December. She declined much more from my September post and was having a hard time eating and drinking on her own and her hospice team started pointing out that her body was showing signs of death being near on her skin and in different areas. She had not been coherent for months and my boyfriend said the night she died he checked on her and she was asleep cuddled up under blankets very peaceful and warm looking and then that's how he and his father found her the next morning in the same position so they figure she died not long after he checked on her. So, it's been an interesting couple of months with both of us grieving the loss of our paternal grandmothers at the same time pretty much, though he had more time to really prepare because she was sick for a year and receiving hospice services but it doesn't take much of the impact out of it at the end of the day.

Despite of all of this, I'm still doing fine. I hurt some days, that's for sure but now that I'm older I'm realizing I cope with these things better than when I was young because I know that whenever my grandfather died when I was around 19, I had a rough year or two after that and hurt a lot of people so I'm glad to see that in some ways I've finally grown up. I'm on break now but looking forward to returning back to my internship in a week from today actually and diving into my last full semester of classes and then after a Summer class, I will have my masters.